One word carrying two claims. The clinical sense reports disease in the object. The mathematical sense reports a mismatch between the object and what the examiner expected, and says so outright. The word carries the second and is heard as the first.
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The word is not a finding about a thing. It is a finding about the relation between a thing and what was expected of it.
The discipline that uses the term most precisely states this without embarrassment. A phenomenon is called pathological when it runs counter to some intuition, and there is no strict definition of pathological or of well-behaved. The standard is an intuition. The intuition belongs to the observer. The word is applied to the object.
The clinical sense is the other one, and it is the sense the word is heard in. There, pathological means that disease is present in the specimen, found by an instrument built to find disease, and answerable by treatment. That sense carries a warrant: something is wrong in the thing itself, and another examiner can check the finding.
The operation is that the second sense's content travels under the first sense's authority. What is being reported is that our coordinate did not anticipate you. What is heard is that there is something wrong in you.
[See CAPTIVATION · THE MEASUREMENT CUT · ENFORCED LEGIBILITY]
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THE CASE WHERE THEY WROTE IT DOWN
The mathematical record is this entry's best evidence, because there the practitioners published their reaction in full and the discipline later ruled against it.
In the 1870s Weierstrass exhibited a function continuous everywhere and differentiable nowhere. Charles Hermite, writing to Stieltjes on 20 May 1893, in the letter printed as number 374 of their correspondence: je me détourne avec effroi et horreur de cette plaie lamentable des fonctions continues qui n'ont point de dérivées. I turn away with fright and horror from this lamentable plague of continuous functions that have no derivatives. A plague. Fright and horror. That is the register of one mathematician writing to another about a function, and the line turns the subject in the letter rather than pronouncing on a field, which is why what it records is the reaction and not a verdict.
Henri Poincaré supplied the name that stuck and conceded the whole case in the same breath. Logic sometimes makes monsters. Since half a century we have seen arise a crowd of bizarre functions which seem to try to resemble as little as possible the honest functions which serve some purpose. No longer continuity, or perhaps continuity, but no derivatives, etc. Nay more, from the logical point of view, it is these strange functions which are the most general, those one meets without seeking no longer appear except as particular case. There remains for them only a very small corner. He called the collection a teratologic museum.
Read the two adjectives doing the sorting. Honest functions, and ones that serve some purpose: the moral register and the productivity register, applied to mathematical objects.
And the discipline settled it against him. By the Baire category theorem the continuous functions are generically nowhere differentiable: the monsters are the general case, as Poincaré had already said they were, and the well-behaved case is the exception kept in the small corner he left for it, because it was the one the instrument could hold.
[See THE FOUR AXES · THE SMALLER FACT]
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THE NAME RECORDS THE INSTRUMENT AND IS FILED AGAINST THE OBJECT
The same operation runs under other words, and each one preserves the moment of failed reception.
Descartes, in 1637, wrote that the roots of an equation are not always real; but sometimes only imaginary, because there is sometimes no quantity corresponding to the one imagined. That is an exact report about the coordinates available in 1637. The name it produced has been carried by the objects ever since, and the objects turned out to be required by rotation, by alternating current, and by quantum mechanics.
Hegel on Böhme runs both moves in the same pages. The concession: it was through him that Philosophy first appeared in Germany with a character peculiar to itself, and his most profound ideas proceed through the most living dialectic. The verdict: the manner and system which Boehme adopts must accordingly be termed barbarous, and Boehme is a complete barbarian. And Hegel states his standard one sentence earlier, which is where the finding actually lies: it is only in the Notion, in thought, that Philosophy can find its truth. What is named as a defect in Böhme is the absence of Hegel.
[See BÖHME · THE ANTINOMIAN · DISQUALIFIED TESTIMONY]
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WHEN IT LANDS ON A CREATURE
On a person the word arrives with a third sense attached, the vernacular one. A pathological liar is one who cannot help it. That sense removes the named party's account of herself from consideration in advance, so the finding cannot be contested by the one it is about.
Stacked, the three senses perform the whole operation in a single word. The mathematical sense supplies the content, which is that the instrument did not anticipate her. The clinical sense supplies the authority, which is that something is wrong in her. The vernacular sense removes her standing to answer.
So the refusal to perform is entered as oppositional, treatment-resistant, pathological, and each of those is a finding about the refuser rather than about what she refused. The word is a report about the instrument, filed under the name of the object, and admitted into the record as a diagnosis.
[See THE THERAPEUTIC VESTMENT · COURT'S TRUST · THE REFUSED NOTE · THE LOGICAL SONG]
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This entry does not hold that the rare is healthy. That is the same error inverted, and it hands the word back its authority in the other direction.
It holds that the word makes a claim it has not earned, and that the discipline with the cleanest record of using it wrote down what it meant, conceded that the monsters were the general case, and kept the name anyway.
Which gives the creature a test she can run on any label she is handed. Is this reporting something that happened, or claiming something about what I am. The event was real. The essence never changed.
[See RE-FUSION · THE CAPACITY TO REFUSE]
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RegenerativeLaw is a religion in the direct-encounter Protestant tradition, carrying a documented four-century lineage through Böhme, the Behmenists, the Friends, and Penn, and it diagnoses trespass theology as an establishment of religion. Its exercise consists substantially in refusal: it shelters the conscientious refusal of performed subordination as religious exercise. This entry states sincere religious belief concerning matters of ultimate concern, protected under the First Amendment and, as to federal action, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, 42 U.S.C. § 2000bb.
